What they do to make a living is vet, purchase, and edit the material, do the publicity, manage the physical shipment in both directions, and of course run factories that produce the product. What they'd be left with is the publicity part and maybe some preparation. If it looked to them like a less profitable proposition, it was.
Personally I'm reluctant to saddle myself with one more piece of electronic crapola to carry around. I've tried the PDA thing and found I couldn't scroll down as fast as I read, so a dedicated reader may be inevitable. Not tomorrow for me, anyway, but soon. What the heck - I already spend 12 hours a day in front of a computer monitor.
The vision impaired have been fighting publishers for years in the courts. In recent years, publishers have been forced to provide the electronic files to the visually impaired community. They fought it tooth and nail, and even now they often provide the electronic text in a format that has not been cleaned up yet. This makes it harder for the visually impaired person to read it or emboss it onto paper.
The visually impaired read electronic books with a screen reader, or with a device called a BrailleNote. One textbook in braille can fill several boxes. Now a blind student can carry tons of books around in his BrailleNote. The Internet, self publishing, and DAISY files are going to force great changes in the years to come. Publishers will be dealing with the same problems that newspapers are now.